Facebook Introduces 360-degree Spherical Video Support for News Feed

Facebook has introduced couple of new technologies during its annual F8 developer conference in San Francisco. One of the announcements was of the 360-degree spherical video support for the News Feed. When the support arrives, it will allow viewers to “move through” videos as they do with 3-D games. The experience can more practically be related to Google Street View or YouTube.

The announcement was made by the company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg who demonstrated the technology to the attendees of the conference. In this introductory package, Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters were captured with twenty-four cameras working in unification. “You can move around inside the video,” Zuckerberg said, “and view it from different angles.”

The company has reportedly started sending invitation to the developers for content generation and publishing purposes. Facebook says its audience count exceeds 1.3 billion people who watch more than 3 billion videos on the service every day.

Now the company is hoping to make the affiliations with its longtime users even stronger with this new variety of online videos. Facebook’s plan is to give its users “immersive, 360-degree video experience,” the company chief said.

While the videos will not be as immersive as VR content is, the move reflects Facebook’s intent to go all in VR business. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook will enable its users to combine the Oculus Rift and spherical videos experience.

The social networking giant acquired the virtual reality head-mounted display in 2014 for a whopping $2 billion. But at that time, tech writers were not sure what Facebook was actually planning with the VR technology company. Things have started becoming clearer now.

Along with the above discussed revolutionary change for Facebook videos, the company is also going to make videos embeddable on third party websites. This is, however, a secondary change on the measure of significance. What is going to enrich the Facebook’s users video watching experience is arguably the edition of support for the 360-degree videos.

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